The 16mm drama “Birch,” directed by Paisley Valentine Walsh, tracks a single father through frigid rural Vermont trying to find the family dog without alarming his two young children. We asked Walsh how the project started, what the biggest challenge was, and what comes next for her…

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

It was a case of a lot of things coming together, I think. I was working at Secret Cinema after my undergrad and I got a taste for the adrenalin wrapped up in creating crazy production. At the same time I had been in the the darkrooms a lot, I loved photography and learning how to work with film material. 

My dad was an artist and really encouraged us to use our hands in life, I found myself at a juncture where I wasn’t using them and I knew I had to make a change- that’s when I went to film school. I wanted to develop something more involved than photo and I started to discover what could happen in moving image, it was massive for me. 

2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?

I’ve been living in the UK since I was 12 or so, and I had always had this strange compartment in my mind reserved for my childhood. I think because it was from a different place geographically, I grew up in rural Vermont and moved directly to Scotland, I always felt my youth was from some parallel world. I was also incredibly fond of my childhood, I think my parents did something really good somehow, I wanted to engage with it and figure out how to recreate some piece of that world. So, me and my crew went back there and went on this bizarre treasure hunt of my life in the 80’s/90’s. The film is fictional of course, but it’s basically set in the world of my disjointed memories. We even went into a storage container which had been locked up in limbo since I left as a kid. My production designer Yu-Hsuan spent days unpacking furniture from it and transporting it to our location, building it into our narrative. The film became incredibly personal to me.

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the best, and the least?

This film was hard because we really pushed the conditions we were working in. We shot over the coldest winter days in Vermont which were dropping to -30 degrees. I will never forget our DOP, Vincenzo’s mustache freezing during a long following shot one morning. Sometimes we would have to get into the car to warm up again after very little time on location, like, we would set the frame and then have to get back into the car to psych ourselves up for the first shot.

We were shooting on film, but I actually think that was one of the most controllable elements of the shoot. We shot on a location which had no electricity and no plumbing, and we had to drive hours into the mountains in a blizzard with our truck everyday to get there, without phone service. We also worked with kids and a dog. It was the type of crazy that you have to be submissive to. I think for the crew we all knew we were in over our heads at the time but it brought a lot of energy to everything we were shooting, we were a big family. 

 4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

I’m fairly obsessed with Happy as Lazzaro, I watched it last summer and haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. Alice Rohrwacher did something I felt like I really hadn’t seen before, at every corner, the film reset my grasp of reality, it’s mesmerizing. You go through all these turns as the audience like you’re on a rollercoaster. The film also has no definable genre which for me is such a refreshing experience. 

5) What’s next for you?

I am developing an experimental short at the moment about the trauma of climate change. It’s a fun project for me because it’s made up of found footage, and recoded anecdotes. I am also developing a feature film set in Scotland, it’s about a surrogate mother who teams up with a single woman she meets online to have a baby.

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Website: http://birchfilm.co.uk/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paisley.v.walsh

Instagram: @PAISLEYVALENTINE

Twitter: @paiswalsh